Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 17:09:47 +0200 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Schmidt?= <sos@DeepCore.dk> To: Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@portaone.com> Cc: Eric Veraart <eric@monkey-online.net> Subject: Re: HostRaid support on FreeBSD Message-ID: <40D99D3B.8010608@DeepCore.dk> In-Reply-To: <40D95FDC.9060802@portaone.com> References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040621135534.068fef40@server01.chassis00.xsnetworks.net> <40D7E0B7.1000905@portaone.com> <40D8D217.5000808@freebsd.org> <40D95FDC.9060802@portaone.com>
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Maxim Sobolev wrote: > Well, my knowelege about internals of software RAID controllers is quite > limited, but as long as I know they are no more than BIOS with UI for > setting up RAIDs and interface to main BIOS that hides internal RAID > structure allowing to boot off the RAID. Also they provide some > persistent storage for RAID configuration, I assume either in some > controller's NVRAM or on the HDDs. Therefore, the same set of GEOM RAID > modules can work with different software RAID controllers (SCSI, ATA, > SATA etc) if there will be a standard way to extract this info from the > controller's driver, and present it in some common format. That's what I > am talking about. Well, I dont know about SCSI, but ATA/SATA always stores the metadata on disk, the controller has nothing todo with the RAID functionality, its merely a way to talk to the disks. Reading the metadata off the disks and using that info to access a RAID array is easy and can be had even without docs in a few hours. Writing back the metadata in case of failures etc to retain sanity of the array is "somewhat" more difficult. Actually I'm working with this currently for new formats for ata-raid and its not trivial to get right. -- -Søren
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